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Dr Kevin Bonham

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Dr Kevin Bonham EMC Submission No. 58 Received 29 August 2019 Submission to the Victorian Electoral Matters Committee Inquiry into the 2018 Victorian State Election Dr Kevin Bonham 1 Summary The “proportional representation” system in the Victorian Legislative Council has been gamed to death by the use of Group Ticket Voting for deliberate preference harvesting and no longer delivers results that are proportional. At the 2018 election, seven minor parties won 10 seats between them from an average primary vote share of 3.4% per seat, in a system supposed to deliver just five seats per region in proportion to support within a region. At least eight of these seats would not have been won in any proportional representation system that did not use Group Ticket Voting. Two parties even won seats from less than 1% of the primary vote, meaning that they were chosen to represent their region despite being among the least popular parties in it. The election was marred by the orchestrated misuse of the Group Ticket Voting system to deliver networks of preference flows that did not represent the way voters would preference if they chose their own preferences between parties. The current system is one in which micro-party MPs are more accountable to the whims of backroom operators and other parties than they are to voters, and in which parties can be disadvantaged because they get too many votes to be worth trading preferences with. The system is farcically broken, should not have been allowed to persist at the 2018 election, and needs to be changed with bipartisan support prior to the next Victorian election. Preferred Legislative Council Recommendation 1. All parties in Victoria, and particularly both major parties, should co-operate to abolish Group Ticket Voting and replace it with a version of the Senate system or some other system that allows for semi-optional preferencing without group ticket transfers between parties. Alternative Legislative Council Recommendations If recommendation 1 above is not accepted, the Victorian Parliament should at least attempt to curb the undemocratic impacts of Group Ticket Voting by doing as many as possible of the following: 1. Introducing an option for voters to distribute preferences between parties above the line as they can in the Senate, so that only votes containing only a 1 above the line would be distributed by Group Ticket, and other votes would be distributed as they would be in the Senate. 2. Outlawing preference-trading, including arrangements between or on behalf of parties to exchange Group Ticket preferences, payments to consultants to co- ordinate or advise on preference flows between parties, and any form of payment to anyone that is contingent on a candidate winning a seat. 2 3. Introducing a primary vote threshold that a ticket must exceed in a region for any candidate from that ticket to be elected in that region. If a party did not meet that threshold its preferences would be distributed among parties that did. An example threshold could be 4% of primary votes. Legislative Assembly Recommendations 1. VEC public communications about the progress of rechecks and recounts of very close seats should be improved. 2. The VEC should distribute preferences in all seats at least to the point of being able to determine the final two candidates if all preferences were thrown and the margin between them. (The purpose of this is to ensure there is a two-candidate preferred margin in cases where the VEC declines to re-align the count in the days following the election). General Recommendation The VEC should be resourced appropriately to carry out the above recommendations. Author Background I am a prominent psephologist based in Tasmania and with over 30 years’ experience in scrutineering and analysing a range of state, federal and local elections. I am also the author of a donation-funded blog-form psephology, poll analysis and political comment website located at http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/ . In this capacity, and on Twitter, I provided very detailed coverage of the 2018 Victorian elections for both houses. I was extensively involved in the process leading to adoption of the new Senate voting system in 2016. This system was implemented to address problems at the 2013 Senate election that were similar in nature to those encountered at the 2018 (and to a lesser extent 2014) Victorian Legislative Council elections. I work professionally both as an electoral studies consultant but also and primarily in an area of science unrelated to elections. My doctorate was in the latter area, but my university studies included a Political Science major. I am writing this submission in a private capacity and am not a member of, associated with or strongly supportive of, any political party. 3 Legislative Council The major focus of this submission is the 2018 Legislative Council election. In 2013 Australia experienced a shambolic Senate election under Group Ticket Voting. Not only were some Senators elected off very small primary vote shares by the standards of a half-Senate (or in some cases, any Senate) election, but one state’s election (WA) had to be voided and rerun. The WA election had to be voided and rerun because the loss of a comparatively small number of votes meant that two seats could not be resolved. They could not be resolved because of the kinds of tipping points between irrelevant candidates early in the count that Group Ticket Voting tends to create. Contrary to false claims that opposition to the old system was confined to cases of election from very low primary votes, the 2013 Senate election also showed many other problems with Group Ticket Voting.1 The Electoral Matters committee initially took a wait-and-see approach (pending the outcome of the Senate reform process) in its review of the 2014 Victorian election, at which five MLCs had already been elected from vote shares between 1.28% and 3.50%. However, Victoria did not review the situation following the 2016 Senate election, at which the many criticisms of the new Senate system made by opponents had proven to be false or wildly exaggerated2. Seats Off Low Statewide Vote Shares The 2018 election saw a modest increase in the combined vote for fourth parties (parties other than Labor, Liberal/National and Green). It also saw increased co-ordination between these parties, perhaps as a result of a decline in purely ideological minor parties. In the end these fourth parties (“micro-parties”) won ten seats between them: Derryn Hinch Justice Party, 3 seats off 3.75% statewide primary Shooters, Fishers and Farmers, 1 seat off 3.02% state primary Liberal Democrats, 2 seats off 2.49% state primary Animal Justice Party, 1 seat off 2.47% state primary Reason, 1 seat off 1.37% primary Sustainable Australia, 1 seat off 0.83% primary Transport Matters, 1 seat off 0.62% primary Most of these parties are now over-represented statewide relative to their very small popular support. By comparison, the most popular minor party, the Greens, recorded 9.25% and won only one seat (2.5%) statewide, and is hence severely under-represented. 1 See http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2013/10/senate-reform-change-this-system-but-to.html for an extensive list. 2 For instance I reviewed many failed predictions at http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2016/08/senate- reform-performance-review-part-1.html and in my similar 2016 JSCEM submission. 4 Seats Off Low Regional Vote Shares Seat wins even by parties with less than 1% of statewide voter support might be justified if the parties had very concentrated local support bases in the eight regions. However, none of the ten fourth-party seats were clearly won on merit based on regional primary vote shares and plausible preference flows had voters chosen their own preferences. Most were clearly not won on merit, with two cases where the fourth party might or might not have won in a fair system. Moreover, the one case where a fourth party did poll a very high vote share highlighted the abject unfairness of the current system. The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers polled a very impressive vote of 7.85% in Northern Victoria, ahead of the Greens and all other minor parties. This is exactly the sort of result that should be rewarded with a fourth-party seat, but the SFF ticket was defeated after being leapfrogged on Group Ticket preference flows by both the Liberal Democrats (3.78%) and Justice Party (4.86%). Neither party would have caught the SFF incumbent had voters directed their own preferences. Absurd examples of disproportional representation played out in the final one or two seats in most of the other regions as well: In Eastern Metropolitan, Transport Matters (0.62%) started behind 11 other parties in the race for the final seat, and ahead of only 6. With negligible primary vote support it should have been quickly eliminated, but instead was able to use Group Ticket preference allocations to defeat the Greens (8.99%) with 14.5 times its primary vote. In Northern Metropolitan, Reason (3.37%) defeated Labor (which started over 9% above its third quota.) Reason would never have bridged this gap by genuine voter choice (since left-wing preferences would have split between Reason, Labor and others) and only did so because an irrelevant and very close tipping point went their way. (That involved whether the Greens narrowly made or narrowly missed quota prior to the exclusion of Victorian Socialists, who also outpolled Reason but had worse preference flows from other party tickets.) In South-East Metropolitan, the Liberal Democrats on 0.84% and 11th on primaries defeated (among others) the Liberals with 12.3% above their first quota.
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